Why was Lowth so successful? Partly, it seems, because Robert Dodsley was his publisher. Dodsley was among the period’s most powerful publishers and was one of the main shareholders in the influential London Magazine and London Evening Post. The commercial success of books had a lot to do with who published them, how they were published, and how effectively they were promoted – something that still holds true. Dodsley was perhaps the leading light of a newly proactive book trade, in which publishers went looking for talent, rather than waiting for the talent to come to them.
Lowth had other useful friends, having dabbled in diplomatic work. He had also enjoyed a good deal of attention as a result of a public spat with the religious controversialist William Warburton about the Book of Job – from which he emerged the victor. One early reflection of his book’s popularity was the decision in 1763 to reissue John Ash’s Grammatical Institutes, originally published in 1760, with the new subtitle ‘An easy introduction to Dr Lowth’s English Grammar’. When Johnson revised his Dictionary for its fourth edition (1773) he respectfully mentioned Lowth’s work twice, and, asked by an ambitious student for a reading list, he recommended Lowth’s Grammar rather than his own.
Lowth’s liking for displaying other writers’ mistakes has impressed his prescriptive and proscriptive heirs. Today a writer making a case for correctness will exhibit examples of others’ stylistic and syntactic cock-ups, enjoining the reader to share a delight in their absurdity. It is no surprise that Lowth’s approach was popular with pedantic Victorian commentators. William Hodgson, Professor of Political Economy at Edinburgh University, published in 1881 a book called Errors in the Use of English, and his opening words were: ‘Acting on the principle that example is better than precept, the Spartans impressed upon their children the wisdom of sobriety by showing them the folly of intemperance … Similarly this work is meant to set forth the merits of correctness in English composition by furnishing examples of the demerits of incorrectness.’28 But is example better than precept? Examples are most useful when they are marshalled in support of an argument, not when they stand alone. Hodgson’s book leads students to be more familiar with mistakes than their opposites. There is a risk that instead of avoiding errors readers will replicate them, having absorbed them by osmosis.
Students were certainly made to learn Lowth’s Grammar. They were expected to memorize the rules and then recite them. Ditto the examples. William Cobbett, whom I have a couple of times mentioned in passing, chose to do this while a soldier garrisoned at Chatham. Awaiting posting to Canada, he copied Lowth out, learnt the text by heart, and then recited it while on sentry duty. The experience informed Cobbett’s A Grammar of the English Language, which he published in New York in 1818 and in London the following year. This volume consisted of letters written to his teenage son James Paul, and its declared audience was ‘Schools and … Young Persons in general; but, more especially … Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-boys’. Cobbett mentions Lowth several times; he appears keen to shrug off his influence.
Johnson and Lowth mark the beginning of a period in which the style of written English becomes noticeably more formal. Characterizing this formality, H. G. Wells wrote that at that time ‘one’s natural hair with its vagaries of rat’s tails, duck’s tails, errant curls, and baldness, gave place to an orderly wig, or was at least decently powdered. The hoop remedied the deficiencies of the feminine form, and the gardener clipped his yews into respectability. All poetry was written to one measure in those days, and a Royal Academy with a lady member was inaugurated that art might become at least decent. Dictionaries began. The crowning glory of Hanoverian literature was a Great Lexicographer.’29 Wells’s picture is intended to be mischievous, and not all his facts are straight, but his assessment has a provocative appeal.
Certainly there was a heightened attention to the craft involved in using English effectively, and self-consciousness about the writer’s art gave rise to a style that was often pompous, elaborate and abstract. Whereas Swift tends to seem cleverly conversational, serious writers in the second half of the eighteenth century appear intent on sounding more decorous. Their prose is fussy. For Hugh Blair, any writer who used a large number of everyday words degraded his arguments; verbal ornaments created an air of dignity. Vocabulary became more courtly and genteel. Johnson in his periodical essays, especially for The Rambler, used ‘philosophic words’ which he thought had not been tarnished by daily use. The OED suggests that colloquial became a term of disapproval in the 1750s; its first authority for this sense is Johnson in The Rambler. In his pieces for periodicals and his longer prose works, Johnson constructed his arguments with the balanced precision of an architect. His style embodied the grammarians’ preference in written English for parallelism, explicitness and an avoidance of the casual and the chatty.30
For many, though, there were more immediate concerns than how best to write: none more so than the snob value of having a good speaking voice and – among the merchant class – expressing oneself in a manner appropriate to commerce. One’s pronunciation was evidence of the company one kept. Thomas Sheridan the younger, of whom we shall later see a good deal more, insisted that his daughters read him long passages from the works of Dr Johnson. He would then correct their faults. Sensitivity to such matters was more acute in the middle portion of society than at either of its extremes. The actor John Philip Kemble, asked by George III if he would ‘obleedge’ him with a pinch of his snuff, is alleged to have replied, ‘With pleasure, your Majesty; but it would become your royal lips much better to say “oblige”.’31
The period’s one descriptive voice belonged to Joseph Priestley – or such, at least, is the conventional wisdom. A theologian, educationalist, political reformer, historian of science and prolific pamphleteer, he is today known mainly as an experimental chemist; among other things he discovered oxygen, which he none too catchily called ‘dephlogisticated air’. Priestley’s unorthodoxy in political and religious matters, which had prevented him from attending a leading university, later imperilled his career in the Church. In 1766, aged thirty-three, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but his polemical works on political and theological questions made him a controversial figure, and his support for the Revolution in France caused riots in Birmingham, where he presided over a dissenting congregation. His reaction was to accept French citizenship, which hardly improved his public image. Shunned and fearful for the welfare of his children, he emigrated to America in 1794, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
In his views on language Priestley was at odds with most of his contemporaries. His thinking was inconsistent, but he was committed to examining usage, and drew his findings from the data that appeared to him, rather than starting with a thesis and then looking for the data to support it. His short book The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761) was the result of his experiences teaching grammar at a school he ran at Nantwich in Cheshire. Priestley insisted that there could be no institution to lay down a standard for correct English. ‘As to a publick Academy,’ he wrote in his preface, ‘I think it not only unsuitable to the genius of a free nation, but in itself ill calculated to reform and fix a language. We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and, in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of Time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of Synods, which are often hasty and injudicious.’32
As Priestley saw it, custom was ‘all-governing’. Where there were two different ways of approaching a linguistic problem, the democracy of common usage would eventually decide in favour of one. Moreover, in matters of style there was room for ‘infinite diversity’: ‘every man hath some peculiarity in his manner … [and] likewise, hath every man a peculiar manner of conceiving things, and expressing his thoughts, which, were he so fortunate as to hit upon subjects adapted to his genius, would not want propriety or beauty.’33 Priestley also had a dig at the efforts of his predecesso
rs and rivals, remarking that some were ‘clogged with superfluous words’; their materials had not been ‘regularly and thoroughly digested’, and their rules often did ‘not correspond with the present state of the language, as it is actually spoken and written’. As for exemplifying the grungy realities of current usage, it struck Priestley that an appendix showing samples of ‘bad English’ would be ‘really useful’, but for the fact that these sloppy sentences would ‘make so uncouth an appearance in print’.34
However, when Priestley produced a second edition of The Rudiments of English Grammar in 1768, it was noticeably different. Whereas in 1761 his introduction strikes a positive note, seven years later he is downbeat and sees that making sense of English grammar is a bigger task than he originally believed. He is uncomfortably aware of the success of Lowth, whose Short Introduction was published soon after the first edition of The Rudiments of English Grammar. Reading Lowth made Priestley question his own thinking.35 In the 1768 edition Priestley writes, ‘I must … acknowledge my obligation to Dr Lowth … It is from an amicable union of labours … that we may most reasonably expect the extension of all kinds of knowledge.’36 Lowth in the many editions of the Short Introduction never says anything about Priestley, and this ‘amicable union of labours’ was a fantasy.
It would be wrong to think of Priestley as a purely descriptive observer of English. He frequently says what forms people ‘must’ or ‘should’ use – more rigid expressions than Lowth’s preferred ‘ought to’.37 He repeatedly uses the words ‘proper’ and ‘propriety’. Yet Priestley has a generosity of tone that is not evident in Lowth’s Short Introduction, and he says with a kind of genial resignation that ‘Language partakes much of the nature of art, and but little of the nature of science’.38
Johnson, Lowth and Priestley had different values, but their endeavours contributed to a change in the idea of what it meant to use English. The experience involved a new self-awareness. Uniform pronunciation, it was felt, could empower a sense of shared British identity. All the while, of course, the drive towards uniformity had the effect of highlighting the diversity of accents and the divisions within society. That diversity is a subject to which we shall return. But first it is time to move to a different arena, and, by way of introduction, I dangle two reported remarks of Johnson’s: ‘I am willing to love all mankind, except an American’, and ‘Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.’
9
O my America, my new found land!
From Thomas Paine to Shredded Wheat
In 1752 a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine mentioned ‘a fair American’ and then explained that ‘by an American I do not mean an Indian, but one descended of British parents born in America’.1 The clarification is striking. To a British audience at that time, the definition of an ‘American’ was hazy. The term had once been used exclusively of native American Indians, before becoming blurred by its use – as in the Gentleman’s Magazine – of the descendants of British settlers. However, during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 British views of American life sharpened; native American Indians fought alongside the British against the colonists, and it became more common to apply the label ‘American’ not to the indigenous peoples, but to the rebellious white colonial subjects. This new denomination reflected a change in the political climate.
The revolution that achieved American independence in 1776 was a challenge to British language as well as to British government. Until that challenge emerged, there was no notion of British English; British English was just called English. The move for American independence began not only as a war of words, but as a war about words. On the American side, figures such as Samuel Adams and Daniel Dulany, inspired by their reading of John Locke’s political writings, complained bitterly of the abuse of words by their geographically remote masters. Reviewing their efforts, Thomas Gustafson has described how this led to ‘a rejection of the King’s English for a new discourse … more faithful to common sense and the language of nature’ and ultimately to ‘the toppling of a mother tongue … to achieve a new science of politics’.2 Some of the keywords in these arguments were liberty, equality, taxation, tyranny and representation, and these repeatedly animated public orations, sermons and pamphlets.
It is significant that Benjamin Franklin, one of the architects of American statehood, was a printer and newspaperman, for the printing press was as important as any other weapon in the American revolution. Before the violence, there was rhetoric. Writing sowed the seeds of revolution, and it brought together stories about the injustices of British rule. The American revolutionaries used a language that was fundamentally the same as that of the people they fought – by no means a norm of revolutions – and preliminary arguments about the rights of the American people were presented in pamphlets and newspaper articles that could be read by both parties.
The writings of James Otis, Richard Bland, John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson expressed a growing sense of crisis in the 1760s and ’70s. The discussion of this crisis often used the word rights, and the understanding of that word was shaped by John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). Locke had argued that all people have the right to liberty and property, as well as suggesting that governments that do not nurture the public good can be replaced. The Declaration of Independence would eventually enshrine Locke’s principles; rather than being a sudden thunderbolt of political imagination, it was the culmination of a series of documents presenting American grievances and aspirations. It was also the apotheosis of the revolutionaries’ eloquent campaign of persuasion and proclamation.
The fiercest exponent of American rights was Thomas Paine. A native of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to America in 1774, having in his first thirty-seven years failed at pretty much everything he had tried – even at being a tobacconist. Yet less than two years after his arrival he published Common Sense, a demand for American independence which sold in excess of 150,000 copies within three months. Paine fought passionately for the American cause, and Common Sense was hugely influential, not least because its insistent style was so different from the familiar language of political argument. ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again,’ he wrote. ‘The birth-day of a new world is at hand … Let the names of Whig and Tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of a good citizen, an open and resolute friend, and a virtuous supporter of the RIGHTS of MANKIND and of the FREE AND INDEPENDANT [sic] STATES OF AMERICA.’3
Fifteen years later, in his Rights of Man, Paine could reflect on events and say, ‘The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language.’ In creating liberty, the role of constitutions is to ‘define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax’.4 Paine sees language as a means of achieving political repression. ‘The punyism of a senseless word like Duke’ is divisive; the existence of titles ‘contract[s] the sphere of a man’s felicity’, and he ‘lives immured within the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man’.5 Paine carved a passage through the fog of political grandiloquence. The vocabulary of the established political order was made to look preposterously antique.
A politically independent United States needed to claim its linguistic independence, and this process began before Paine entered the fray. An anonymous author in 1774 proposed the foundation of an American Society of Language, claiming that ‘The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this LAND of light and freedom. As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people in England ever enjoyed.’6 These words appeared in a letter addressed ‘To the Literati of America’. It may well have been written by John Adams, later to be the second President of the United States.
Whoever the author was, he was reflect
ing on more than 150 years of American English. Many of the people who sailed to America saw their journey as an opportunity to forge a distinct identity. They brought with them the pronunciations and vocabulary of their day, which, in their new environment, survived linguistic changes that were happening back in Britain. The result was a form of English that struck British observers as archaic. Besides this, their use of English was shaped by contact with native American Indians, as well as with other settlers who spoke French, Dutch, German or Spanish. Their new circumstances gave rise to new experiences and behaviours. Today, if we compare the vocabularies of British English and American English, we see obvious differences in areas such as food, schooling, transportation, wildlife, shopping and basic household articles. These began early.
The first person to comment in print that a word meant different things on the two sides of the Atlantic was John Josselyn in 1663, when he noted that in America the noun ordinary meant a tavern, whereas in England it denoted a boarding house. Later commentators saw a large and growing difference between the two forms of the language, and saw also regional disparities within the American word-stock. In the 1750s Benjamin Franklin remarked on the existence of expressions that were peculiar to one colony and unintelligible to others; he was a Bostonian transplanted to Pennsylvania and spoke from his own awkward experience.7
The word Americanism was coined in 1781 by John Witherspoon, a Scot who had thirteen years previously arrived at Princeton to be president of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey. The idea that such a thing existed was older. Settlers in America had been adding to the English language since the early seventeenth century, borrowing terms and coining new ones to denote their new ways of life. H. L. Mencken, in his huge book The American Language, declares that ‘The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since’. He mentions as examples of this their turning ‘verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both’. Meanings altered, some words held on far longer than they did in Britain, and Americans revealed a ‘superior imaginativeness … in meeting linguistic emergencies’.8 The differences attracted comment. In 1754 Richard Owen Cambridge proposed that Johnson’s Dictionary, the publication of which was looming, should be supplemented with a list of terms peculiar to the American colonies. No supplement appeared, but Johnson did define currency as ‘The papers stamped in the English colonies by authority, and passing for money’ – a nod to what was then an American term, used by Benjamin Franklin as long ago as 1729. Those hoping for an exhibition of the disparities in vocabulary had to wait until 1816, when John Pickering published the first book-length collection of Americanisms. Examples of his haul included backwoodsmen, to deputize, to graduate and package. Pickering was not celebrating these words. Instead he was trying to narrow the gap between British and American forms of English, by providing a guide to the words that might prevent a British reader from making sense of an American book. He was explicit that Americanisms were not part of ‘correct English’.
The Language Wars Page 13